The Horse Lord

by Peter Morwood

Reviewed by Coral

Aldric is the third son born to Clan-Lord Talvalin, one of the noble Alban clans. There is no chance for him to inherit his father's kingdom, he can only hope to be the best and most honorable soldier he can be. Then his entire clan is wiped out by a necromancer agent who's supposed to be working for an Emperor who wants to gain control through the spread of chaos and dissent, but who's really looking to carve himself out a good sized kingdom of his own.

Rather than taking his own life, which was expected of him, he swears revenge on the necromancer, which involves the tracking down of magical artifacts and something and then a battle to decide everyone's fate once and for all.

By the mid-part of this book I just started skimming over it.

The style of writing was one of the main reasons why the book was so hard to get into. One thing I didn't like - though not unique to this author - was how there'd be a word, a fancy, made up word as a title, or a weapon, or whatever, and then you'd have an equivalent that everyone would understand. I don't know, but I find it very awkward to be reading sentences that are basically, "And they had a secret rendezvous - get together - at the cul-de-sac - dead end." And then you just get all these sentences strung together of words that you don't know the meaning of because you've been skimming, or can't remember, or whatever.

The plot gets muddled in the middle, and really bogged down by Aldric's pointless romance. I mean, as soon as the girl arrives on scene it's obvious they're eventually going to end up together. Really, though, I wish authors would spend a little bit more time realistically developing romances or something, because there was not a moment I actually cared about them, or bought them as a couple. You can't just write, "boy meets girl" "boy gets girl". There needs to be actually chemistry or progress or something, because then you just get something like this, an utterly pointless waste of page space.

And, really, the reveal about Aldric's brother Baiart? Not that surprising. Really, really obvious.

So I didn't hate this book, it was just completely boring.

Grade C